Heavy Machinery
Heavy Machinery is the fifteenth level of Crash Bandicoot. At long last, Crashie has trumped the uninteresting Koala Kong and hijacked Kongie's own private minecart speedboat to arrive on Cortex Island, at long last! Predictably, the first thing he sees on the island is a fast food joint - Uncle Cortie's Down-Home Old-Fashioned Hamburgers, one of several hundred locations throughout Oceania. However, the delightful vegetarian bandicoot has no interest in their "beef"-based chicanery, as he's much more interested in using its disgusting kitchen as a shortcut into the Cortex Power complex, somehow! He must get his mind off the disgusting containers in the background leaking Uncle Cortie's Patented Secret Green Sauce, and focus on the barrage of fast-food-themed obstacles that face him, including pipes (safe cold ones containing lip-smackingly delicious soft-serve Wumpa Fruit ice cream, and deadly red-hot ones filled with flowing trans fat oil) and, of course, the irritable kitchen crew, consisting of Generic Robot Unit 8000s, Un-Holo-Projectors, and Uncle Cortie's Patented Robo-Pincushions with Robo-Periscopes. Ughhh. This restaurant sounds annoying. But at least they don't charge $1.39 FOR A FUCKING JR. BACON CHEESEBURGER!!!!! Uncle Cortie vs. the Real World: A Quarter-Pound (Pre-Cooked Weight) of Wacky Restaurant Hijinx! Did you know? Everyone who worked on Crash Bandicoot only cared about money (unlike Squaresoft)! Everyone was only in this ill-fated vessel of a game to sail the seven salty seas of consumerism to rake in the massive treasure troves of, um, cash. Who was the greediest of them all? Well, Executive Producer Mark Cerny is certainly a candidate, though he can be excused for his money-related development foibles were solely for the pure, wholesome pursuit of pussy. Instead, I'd have to nominate Non-Executive Producer Dave Siller. He tried so very hard to make money for all his work. It's just disgusting. Did I ever tell you about the silliest Siller-est money-making scheme ever? No? I will tell you about that scheme right now! Americans are universally morbidly obese. That's our country's schtick. We like food, and we like it fast, hence the invention of "fast food". When Non-Executive Producer Dave Siller was notified by the development team that they wanted to make a pair of levels (this and Castle Machinery) set in a fast food restaurant's kitchen, he saw dollar signs in his eyes, like some shitty cartoon character. He wanted to launch the real-world version of Uncle Cortie's Down-Home Old-Fashioned Hamburgers! After some unspecified amount of time doing boring business-y things, his initial plans were almost complete. An initial test location was to be launched in the bustling metropolis of Cleveland, Mississippi. As a fast food joint that relied heavily on children for business (being based on a video game that no adult in their right mind would ever play!), it was pretty much required for Davey-poo to come up with some good and interesting Crashie-themed toys for Uncle Cortie's Patented N-Joyable Kidz Mealz. As such, he outsourced this task to some Chinese dude. Ultimately, after several months of brainstorming, production, and stir-frying, Wen Jiabao returned to Siller-y Clinton with an impressive lineup of ten impressive N-Joyable Kidz Mealz Toyz (presented here by Ex-Talk Show Host Conan O'Bulletpoints): *A Crash Bandicoot top, with obvious manual Spin Attacking action! *One of those shitty finger-skateboards, modelled loosely after Dr. Neo Cortex's hoverboard! *A hand-cranked Ripper Roo-in-the-Box! *Pinstripe Potoroo's best friend, Tommy, with realistic water-shooting action! *A miniature bowling game based on the levels Boulders and Boulder Dash, featuring a tiny boulder bowling ball and ten cheap Crash Bandi-pins! *A Crash Bandicoot figure with amazing teeth-chattering action, because it is essentially just built onto those gag plastic chattery teeth! *A Papu Papu figure whose belly can be used as a bongo drum, because it is just shamelessly a cheap repainted bongo drum! *A rock, supposedly one of Koala Kong's! *A Wartie figure, made from 100% real ham! *A beaker that Wen Jiabao stole from some lab, filled with random, unknown, possibly hazardous chemicals, supposedly one of Dr. Nitrus Brio's! The lineup quite obviously exceeded the quality of its fast food rivals of the time, which all gave children only the lamest toys possible, because they literally only care about money, unlike Dave Siller. Or, exactly like him, I suppose. I'm confused. Well, anyway. Everything was set for success, until he sat down to devour the inaugural Uncle Cortie's Patented N-Joyable Kidz Mealz meal with his beloved daughter, Willa. The burger? Passable. The fries? Potato-like enough to fool a child. But David Sillerman was shocked and disgusted when Willa pulled out that cheap-ass ten-pin bowling abortion. If there's one thing Davey-Wavey loved even more than American legal tender, it's The Sport of Kings, Bowling. Electron Dave-nue disliked how Chinese Mr. Gerbil was using this set of toys to dumb down this sport even further in the eyes of everyone. He immediately ordered the entire stockpile of toys destroyed, to be replaced at the last minute by a last-minute replacement. Baby Beans. Veggies have never been more adorable. Awwwwwwwww. :) Of course, the fatties in the Mississippi version of Cleveland hate vegetables with a passion, and the test location quickly faltered, rendering the real-world version of Uncle Cortie's Down-Home Old-Fashioned Hamburgers a thing of the past. Davey and Silliath's mistake was, quite obviously, the explanation for his departure from the series, as he was deeply embarrassed, as he did not make money, which is all he cares about, aside from bowling, which is an expensive sport that he couldn't afford to play without money anyway. These sort of hair-brained schemes would plague him for the rest of his career, as shown by his later attempt to create the Applebee's-esque bar-and-grill chain: Maximoo, Steaks for Glorious Eaters! (Everyone remembers that famous Dave Siller game, right? Please tell me they do.) Trivia *This level's name is a witty reference to one of the obstacles appearing in this stage: conveyor belts, aka treadmills, which are machinery often used by heavy (fat) people in an attempt to lose weight. This is made even more true by the fact that most fatties like to eat fast food, constantly. *Making their début in this stage are adorable floating pods greatly resembling the Holo-Projector from Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Gold in the Old West, Because He Is a Stereotypical Old West Prospector Guy. Disappointingly, however, they project no holograms at any point in this game. Some fans interpret this to mean that this level's Un-Holo-Projectors can't project holograms after all. This is dumb. Smart fans simply believe that Cortex simply did not want to talk to Crash yet in this game, as it was still early in the series and they did not know each other that well. It would have been entirely too awkward for the PlayStation's primitive awkwardness renderer to accurately render. *This is the first level in the series to feature robots, of any sort. Fascinatingly, John DiMaggio, who would begin voicing characters in the Crash series starting with Crash Bandicoot Presents: Night of the Living Rokart, was also very famous for portraying a fictional robot of any sort, Bender, from the animated series Futurama. Tragically, though, none of the Crashie characters DiMaggio ended up voicing were robots, of any sort. It seems like such a glaring omission, doesn't it? When are we gonna start typecasting that douchebag already??? *This level, like Castle Machinery later in the same game, is one of the more educational levels in the Crash series. The frozen iced Wumpa cream pipes, coloured blue, are safe to touch, while the piping hot trans fat ones, coloured red, are not, teaching children the valuable lesson of using colour to determine how dangerous things might be. *Additionally, this level, specifically, features another unique lesson of its own. The only way to successfully procure this level's Clear Gem is to break all its crates, but some of them can literally only be found by finding the brief secret route, which can literally only be found by making Crashie blindly throw himself off one of the ledges into a seemingly bottomless pit, thus proving that, sometimes, reckless suicide attempts are a good thing for everyone involved.